Monday, November 3, 2008

about ARMv5TE

In 1999, the ARMv5TE architecture introduced improvements to the Thumb architecture, along with ARM ‘Enhanced’ DSP instruction set extensions to the ARM ISA.The Thumb changes added a few new instructions along with improvements to Thumb/ARM interworking, greatly improving compiler capabilities and the ability to mix and match ARM versus Thumb routines to balance code size and performance.The enhanced DSP instructions include support for saturated arithmetic, and provide up to 70% performance improvement for audio DSP applications. Many systems require the flexibility of a microcontroller combined with the data-processing capability of a DSP, historically forcing designers to compromise performance with cost, or adopt complex multi processor strategies. The ‘E’ instruction set extensions were designed to provide a DSP capability in a general purpose CPU, resulting in improved performance and flexibility.